Rebuilding Violent Places

In October of 2006, an Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, hired a contractor to demolish their schoolhouse with a backhoe and remove the debris to an undisclosed location. The demolition took only fifteen minutes, at dawn, and by noon on the same day the building’s former site had been planted with clover and grass. Six months later and a few hundred yards away, the community opened a new one-room schoolhouse—superficially identical but, within closely held design traditions, as architecturally different as possible from its predecessor.

In August of 2012, members of the Sikh community of Oak Creek, Wisconsin, replaced shattered windows, removed stained carpets, and replastered damaged drywall, restoring their temple to its previous meticulous order—all but for a dime-size hole in a metal doorframe leading to the main prayer area, beside which they placed a small gold-colored plaque inscribed with the words “We Are One.”

In December of 2007, the provost of Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Virginia, announced that a thousand square feet of the second floor of a campus building called Norris Hall would be converted to a Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention, while some further three thousand square feet would house the school’s Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, whose old home in neighboring Burruss Hall would become a new Center for Student Engagement and Community Partnerships.

In January of 2013, the Cinemark multiplex in Aurora, Colorado, reopened with a new name, having converted, from numbers to letters, the signs identifying its individual theatres, and having combined two existing theatres, including its well-known Theatre Nine, into a new oversize screening room called XD-I. The initials XD stand for extreme digital, a widescreen format that enabled Cinemark, on the night of the reopening, to project “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” to its fullest technological effect.

The common thread to these—and many more—demolitions and constructions is the legacy of gun violence, and the fates of the spaces in which mass shootings have taken place. Since the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School (which partially converted its infamous cafeteria and library into a glassy atrium with a mural of a tree canopy on its ceiling), that question about design and public space has shadowed the protracted policy debate about these public tragedies.

Recently, that question has come to Newtown, Connecticut, where the future of the building housing Sandy Hook Elementary remains uncertain. A January town meeting at the Newtown High School auditorium, as reported in the New York Times, revealed the range and passion of opinion. “I cannot ask my son or any of the people at the school to ever walk back into that building,” said one mother of children who had been at Sandy Hook on the day of the shooting, who wanted the building razed and replaced. “My children have had everything taken away from them,” said another mother, who wanted the school restored and reopened, suggesting that taking away their school building would add injury upon injury, loss upon loss.

Architecture has a special relationship to memory. And to disaster. The memory palace, that celebrated mnemonic device wherein Roman orators remembered passages from speeches by visualizing themselves walking through corresponding passageways in imaginary buildings, has its legendary origin in the story of a sole survivor retracing his steps through a recollected dinner party, in order to recover the bodies of friends buried by a catastrophic roof collapse.

To return to any place is, associatively or figuratively, to reconstruct any event that happened at that place—especially if it’s a personally or universally defining event. To acutely mark that spot with an architectural artifact like a monument or memorial makes it impossible to miss, but also denies us the architectural setting of everyday life that enabled—or witnessed—that event in the first place. And such monuments can also seem, all too easily, to relieve us from our duty of further recollection and reflection. To demolish whatever stood at a place may seem like erasing that place’s defining event from history. But, conversely, to restore a place too completely to some earlier state can become a form of erasure, a denial that any disruption has ever happened. After the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center were destroyed, in 2001, the footprints of those buildings were declared inviolately unbuildable in perpetuity—an act of polemical and political remembering. The very evening of the day on which Venice’s St. Mark’s Campanile suddenly collapsed, in 1902, officials voted to rapidly construct a photographically exact replica on the spot—an act of strangely precise forgetting.

Shootings, events defined by immediate sightlines and ballistic trajectories, are an especially spatial and architectural kind of violence, and some ineffable part of their violence is to space itself—to the very airspace or geographical coördinates at which shots were fired or taken. The architectural task in the long aftermath of such shootings is not only to repair structural damage but to calibrate a balance between remembering and forgetting sufficient for daily life to continue nearby—and to figure out how the shapes, materials, and details of buildings can participate in that calibration. The architectural task is not only to provide actual security and defensibility but to figure out how the ways you see and move through buildings can affect your feelings of being at risk or at home.

It’s a task familiar to Erlend Haffner, a young architect and founder, with Hakon Aasarod, of the Oslo design firm Fantastic Norway. Two months after the July, 2011, mass shootings at the Labor Youth Party summer camp on Utoya Island on Lake Tyrifjorden in southeast Norway, Haffner began weekly meetings with survivors—mapping an architectural path forward for the camp. Existing structures on the island will be restored and refurbished for this coming summer, and designs and renderings for new buildings were released last September. The sometimes-surprising solutions that Fantastic Norway developed are tailored to that particular distant island, but they may also have universal applications for Sandy Hook and beyond. “The task,” Haffner said, “consists of not just designing a new space but also trying to understand people’s relationship to the place, in order to recognize and reclaim it, to win it back.”

Haffner and Aasarod were unusually well prepared for the kind of long listening those weekly meetings required. Partway through architecture school, in 2004, the two dropped out for two years and drove around Norway in a bright red caravan decorated with their first names, printed in an insouciant Atari-era typeface, becoming roving community organizers and designers. “We would pull into small towns and villages,” said Haffner, “and meet with communities to discover their needs, and to see if those needs could be met by design, and if we could fund parks, people, public space. It was our real education.”

What Haffner remembers most from his early meetings with Utoya stakeholders was their great concern that the camp would cease to be a functioning facility, and would inadvertently become a permanent shrine. “They had a fierce desire that it continue to be a living place,” he said. One consequence of that desire was the decision to site an official memorial on the mainland and a smaller, private memorial site for families at a secluded spot at the southern end of the island itself. Another challenge was iconography: “This quite famous image went all around the world, of this stark white house on a dark island,” Haffner recalled, “and it suddenly appeared as something quite sinister.”

So the designers focused on transforming the profile of the island landscape as seen from an approaching ferry. In the proposed design, that historic white structure, an administrative building halfway up a hill rising from the water’s edge, is now overlooked and surrounded by a spiky skyline of buildings farther up at the ridge of that hill. “The new buildings become characters that stand behind the old, so it’s not alone anymore,” said Haffner, “like all these guys standing together, saying we’re here beside you, developing a collective spirit.”

Those small new buildings have big old personalities. Freestanding bell towers and lookouts, bird-like and modernly angular, are connected by sheltered deck walkways to low, broad-shouldered sheds that recall vernacular farming and fishing structures. “We wanted them to have a kind of familiarity with the landscape,” said Haffner, “and be neither a spaceship from the future nor a traditional log house from the past: something simple and quite pure but down-to-earth and pragmatic.” The desired effect, he said, is one of timelessness, “almost as if you had just built them yourself, or as if they had been there forever.”

The camp decided to add substantial new facilities, and while consolidating functions in a single location would result in an economical, monumental, and presumably more easily secured building, Fantastic Norway’s design deliberately distributes these functions among many small and light structures. This village-like approach enables the design to flexibly adapt over time to the camp’s continuing discussions about which existing structures to refurbish or demolish.

This seeming inefficiency also has a more subtle—but profound—effect on the mood prompted by the new spaces around the new buildings. “For those who choose to return to the camp,” said Haffner, “we’re working to make people feel more protected than before, and to feel more in control. So we defined a lot of different zones where people could be alone and together, at different scales of activity, so you can choose what degree of interaction you want.” The outdoor spaces and pathways associated with different buildings are deliberately configured to overlap and blur. “The social zones float over each other,” said Haffner, “like when my house is also your house a little bit. We’re allowing different people to find the different places where they would feel most comfortable. And because we keep primary functions on the ground floors, we have a network of many low indoor-outdoor spaces, where you can be outdoors but sheltered, indoors but in the landscape. You can feel like your back is safe, but you’re still part of the social and natural life around you.”

Although there is presumably a security bottleneck at the island’s ferry dock, the “New Utoya” design has no single monumental gate or door. And while some landscaped paths are shifted to respect sites of concentrated violence, the general layout is configured to encourage a certain wandering serendipity. “It’s a summer camp,” said Haffner. “People float in and out, there is not a main entrance anywhere, and you can be more in and more out, as you feel. The building doesn’t have total control, and this is good. People will find their own way.”

And while much of Fantastic Norway’s design for New Utoya is a matter of conjuring intangible atmospheres, some of its essential effects come from things you can touch. “There’s something about the human scale and body,” said Haffner, “about being able to recognize your own proportions in a building, in a column you can grasp and touch and swing around.” And, he said, there’s something about wood. “All the buildings are wood, and all wooden boards are as individual as people,” said Haffner. “We are not in a slick situation. Wood gets worn in as the people who use it make marks on it. Wood is one way to acknowledge that all the time which is ahead will also make its mark.”